1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicle control apparatus that performs automatic steering control, or in other words, a vehicle automatic steering control apparatus.
2. Related Art
A vehicle automatic steering control apparatus is known that performs automatic steering control. On a road that is divided into a plurality of cruising lanes by white lane-markers (hereinafter referred to as “white lines”) such as a paved road, the vehicle automatic steering control apparatus recognizes the white lines from a captured image of the view ahead of or behind the vehicle, and performs automatic steering control such that the vehicle travels near the center of a cruising lane demarcated by two white lines. When the vehicle performs automatic steering, for example, when projecting objects such as a series of poles are placed continuously at uniform intervals on a white line in order to provide a median (i.e., central reservation), the occupant in the vehicle experiences greater stress compared to when the poles are not present, even when the distance between the vehicle and the white line is the same in both instances. This is especially true when the poles are near the eye-level height of the occupant. To prevent this situation, a technology is known in which automatic steering control is performed such that the vehicle is farther away from the white line when the projecting objects are present on the white line, compared to when the projecting objects are not present (refer, for example, to JP-A-2007-22134). Here, the projecting objects refer to objects placed along the white line and include objects placed near the white line.
However, in the technology described in JP-A-2007-22134, focus is placed only on the projecting objects. Control is merely performed such that the vehicle is simply farther away from the projecting objects that in an ordinary state. Therefore, when the vehicle avoids the projecting objects, the vehicle becomes closer to the adjacent lane on the other side by the same extent. When a traveling vehicle is present in the adjacent lane, the vehicle approaches the other vehicle. A problem occurs in that the occupant of the vehicle and the occupant of the vehicle traveling in the adjacent lane both experience discomfort and stress. Therefore, a vehicle automatic steering control apparatus is desired that reduces discomfort and stress to occupants in such instances.